APPENDIX 707 



The Captain said: "Look out for next Saturday; the chances are 

 that we will get a bad one on January 10th." The next Saturday 

 about five A. M. all hands were awakened by a loud crashing and groan- 

 ing of the ship and for a few minutes she was writhing in her ice 

 dock as if her last hour had come. But after a while things quieted 

 down. The Captain said, "Look out for this evening at the turn of 

 the tide," and he made another good guess. It happened to be blowing 

 rather strong from the north at this time and everybody was on the 

 alert that evening. During the day the Captain had all the snow 

 removed from the decks — an inch or two of snow — to lighten the ship. 

 This was so she might rise more easily under pressure. There were a 

 few other small things attended to for the safety of the crew. 



About seven P. M. we got a strong squeezing which seemed to lift 

 the ship several inches. Fifteen minutes later there was a loud crack- 

 ing of timbers, the ship heeled to starboard several degrees, and water 

 commenced to pour into the engine room. A few minutes later the 

 Captain gave orders to abandon the ship. 



The only food that was taken out of the ship at this time was 

 all the Hudson's Bay and Underwood pemmican. The Captain ordered 

 the Danish and Norwegian pemmican to be left in the ship. He de- 

 tailed me to look out for all the bags of clothing that were in Mr. 

 Stefansson's cabin, and also the rifles, ammunition, etc. I told the 

 Captain I would like to have a shotgun ashore in Wrangel Island, but 

 he said that explorers did not use shotguns. I told him we were not 

 going ashore to explore but to live and that I knew of a crowbill rookery 

 on Wrangel Island. If we were planning to live there during the 

 summer I thought a shotgun would be more use there than a rifle. So 

 it was finally decided we would take a twelve-gauge shotgun, but the 

 ammunition that was passed out of the ship with this shotgun was 

 all sixteen-gauge loaded shells and the mistake was not discovered until 

 too late. 



After the pemmican and other stuff was on the ice, the Captain 

 ordered me to take the two Eskimos and build two large houses. The 

 walls were made of boxes of bread and sacks of coal reinforced with 

 snow and covered with the ship's sail that had been placed on the ice 

 several weeks before. We lived in those houses very comfortably until 

 the camp was deserted several weeks later. 



During this time a blizzard was blowing from the north. As fast 

 as anything was placed on the ice it was covered with the drifting 

 snow. I put an extra case of .30-30 ammunition on the ice, as the two 

 natives had each a .30-30 rifle. Later these cases of ammunition could 

 not be found, nor yet a case of 6^/2 mm. [Mannlicher] ammunition. 



There was plenty of time to save everything we wanted from the 

 ship, for she was held tight in the ice all that night and the next day 

 until three-thirty P. M. During the last several hours no one went 

 aboard except the Captain. A few minutes after three-thirty P. M., 



